


no speculation in those eyes

by delimited (eggfish)



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Cannibalism, Character Study, Comes Back Wrong, Derealization, Gen, Gore, Horror, Milk Man 2: Dairy Boogaloo, Repressed Memories, Tags: Missing Scenes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-15
Updated: 2020-09-15
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:28:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26463421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eggfish/pseuds/delimited
Summary: Preoccupied as he was with the dilapidated mysteries of the House of the First, Silas did not register the far fouler and more perverse error in his circumstances until he was alone with it in the confine of his rooms.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 18





	no speculation in those eyes

**Author's Note:**

> Set during HtN, so big spoilers. This premise was way too good to pass up okay (I also want to see Marta's missing scenes, but I don't think I can write that).
> 
> Aside from the tags(!), general warning for Silas POV and everything that entails.

Preoccupied as he was with the dilapidated mysteries of the House of the First, Silas did not register the far fouler and more perverse error in his circumstances until he was alone with it in the confine of his rooms. 

There had been signs. During that first prayer in the sun-ravaged atrium he had detected a hint of discord, some laggards or mumblers around him where the Houses should have worshipped as one; he had accepted it as a failure in their educations. And later, when he was helping Colum move out the sofa from their quarters, the older man had fumbled and dropped one end onto his own foot. He'd said, "Ow", a bizarre noise that Silas had never heard him utter before. Cavaliers of the Eighth did not have functioning pain receptors, or else what their necromancers asked of them would be quite inhumane. It was inconsequential enough that Silas assumed he'd misheard. 

But there was no explaining it away when the time came to ward and pray over the cleared room and Colum did not know the words. 

"Let the King Undying…" Silas started, and glanced at his silent cavalier. "Let the King…" he prompted again. "Brother Colum, will you not join me in prayer?" There was no response. He reached out to shake Colum's shoulder, but hesitated and could not quite do it. "Brother _Asht_ ," he tried more sharply.

Colum turned. "I pray," he said in his medication-scratched voice, a completely wrong beginning, and paused - his lips twitched as if to form more words, but nothing came. He fell silent as if waiting to be told, even though he was the one who had taught Silas the correct orison fifteen years ago.

He loomed over Silas then, in that empty space not yet made safe. Some trick of the light cast his face into shade, obscured his eyes under their heavy brows, so that suddenly this man he had known for all his life seemed totally alien. Gripped by a terrible suspicion, Silas began to back slowly away from the indistinct figure. It did not pursue him. It stood there like a thing from a waking nightmare. He probed it necromantically, and he found that while it lived and breathed, and wore Colum's shape, it lacked a soul.

In an odd way this fact spared Silas all the confusion, grief, and despair he might have ordinarily felt on discovering the death of his cavalier, because the Eighth taught a very specific procedure to be carried out upon the discovery of a body moving independent of its soul. The first step was to execute it as quickly as possible by any means necessary: within seconds he had dissipated all the thalergy from Colum's unresisting body and it toppled over with a thud. He did not let himself look at that body on the floor, solid and scarred and familiar as it was; he shut and locked the door to the rooms of the Eighth and retreated to the smaller ones opposite, which they had been using to store the furniture in. Although it was undignified, he then went and hid in the bathroom. At least there it was clean. 

He braced his palms against the cold tiles, willing his irrelevant body to stop trembling, and considered his next move. The next step upon discovery of a body independent of its soul: locate the person responsible and bring them to justice. There was only a small time frame in which Colum's soul could have been removed; based on the soulless entity's imitation of its host's behaviour, which was like none of the ravenous River manifestations Silas had ever been taught about, it was not the result of a siphoning. So it had happened here on the First, the culprit was one of the other heirs to the Houses, and he should call Colum's ghost back to find out which.

That was the first time he ever had to let his own blood for a summoning. Much later, after he had failed to even access the River, and rinsed his wet face, and rinsed all of the blood-offering out of the sink, he was forced to reformulate his plan. He was on his own. That was fine; he didn't need his youngest nephew to hold his hand and hadn't for years, he thought with a flash of truculence. He was still perfectly capable of fulfilling his duty.

Fulfil one's duty to House and Emperor, no matter the cost: the Eighth had taught him this even before he'd learnt his first prayer. He had been created as his House's salvation, one perfect heir after ten years of genetic permutation in paling womb-vats. When the role of Master had fallen to him at thirteen he had matched their expectations as a prodigy of the faith - now the situation demanded the templar's action rather than the priest's devotion, and he would match that too.

He couldn't reach the River. But his necromancy remained otherwise functional, a strange phenomenon suggesting some artifice of the environs working upon him. Whatever it was, it was like no theorem he had ever read of. It was perhaps the same that had left Colum as a sick thing without a soul on entry. To Silas that part seemed a mistake. He would have to take responsibility for investigating any other mistakes that this place had spawned, and wipe them out - under no circumstances was it right or safe for a soulless body to walk among the living. The other Houses, ever weak, need never face down the horror of killing a loved one. He would take on that burden for them. 

This decided, he returned to the usual routine set out for necromancers in the Tome, making sure to pray twice over in penitence for the lateness of the hour. At the last he considered the the bed in the adjoining room, which had a pillowy embroidered duvet that looked as if he might drown in it, and stood itself on a thick carpet swimming with woven patterns of colour; after some deliberation he returned and lay down in the bathtub to sleep.

\--

In the light of morning, the world seemed to have come unstuck. Time passed in uneven clots. He had expected the First House to be a beautiful temple, but instead its dimensions and angles sat together badly, as if birthed from a distracted consciousness; he often found himself shifting between locations with little understanding of what had come between. He resisted this stubbornly, retracing his steps over and over until they held together. Before daybreak he had mapped Canaan up to the thresholds of the other Houses - of all of them, the Fourth and Sixth hung gaping, though he would not lower himself to peering inside - but it took half the day to find the hatch to the facility beneath. This he could not even open, having locked the key away with its bearer.

Ultimately, he dismissed the whole of the underground as an irrelevant hazard. He could not hope to do much worthwhile necromancy as a broken-off half, nor was his goal now to become a Lyctor. And as for any revenant lying dormant down there - hauntings were part of the natural order. His concern was solely with the undead.

In the course of his explorations, he had the chance to verify plenty of the other scions. Scurrying through the halls in paranoid stop-starts were the heretic Ninth: some brat he refused to look at too closely, and a drudge trailing behind who was no easier on the eye. Both were done up in heinous death masks and borderline necrophilic black-and-bone vestments. They had souls, though there was something wrong with the leader's - something tumorous or multiplicitous - which made his head hurt. The priests of the First, too, had a cancerous quality to their souls. It did not interest him at the moment.

Next were the heedless Fifth: Abigail Pent trailing her hand against the ancient walls of an upper floor with an insolent fascination, murmuring about _domestic arrangements,_ with the revoltingly wedded Quinn at her side. They were only too real. The one time he tried to visit the library, he saw that they had destroyed its ancient sanctity by harvesting a mess of books and papers from the shelves. They spied him through the stacks, and Lady Pent rose to her feet, though her shoddy cavalier touched the small of her back as if to caution her. He had no wish to talk to them, and left quickly.

While searching the outer terraces, the superficial Seventh: Dulcinea Septimus' robes billowing superfluously in the wind as she stretched toward the cold sunlight, breathing hard, and Protesilaus Ebdoma standing guard at her back. He approved that possibly the least upsetting of the pairs were still in possession of their souls.

The rest were more uncertain. From another terrace he saw the boorish red of the Second making their way toward the facility, and he thought he might have seen only one soul between them, rather than a pair. But they were too far away to probe properly, and either way he could not follow them down. Of the Fourth and the Sixth there were no sign. He suspected that they too were working down in the basement. They would have to come back up later; then he would know. 

The Third trio he saw last, at the end of a long unlit corridor. They drifted through the dead space without purpose, a tangle of long limbs and limp hair, murmuring intimately and stumbling over one another's feet. They seemed to see him too, for their eyes and teeth and opulent jewelleries glinted at him in the half-light, and they changed course as if repelled by his presence. The sight of their closeness made him sick and he could not bring himself to follow.

That night there was a fuss; once the others had left the mortuary, he went and looked at Judith Deuteros laid out on the slab. So the revenant was indeed dangerous. He felt no fear at the sight of her destroyed body, just distaste and weariness. The world was full of so many unpleasant and unfortunate things; there was so much that could not be averted, only atoned for. He had always known this. It was the truth on which his House was built.

After that it seemed that the bodies of the Sixth were laid next to hers very quickly. It was unclear what he had done in the meantime - had he slept, or done anything at all except pray, perform ablutions, and struggle to tie up his own hair? Little matter. He saw how the Sixth pair must have waited for their bullets, and thought again of the entity that had been his cavalier submitting dead-eyed to its death. He suspected that the revenant was doing his work for him, executing these things as they wandered deep beneath the ground. 

\--

The Duchess of Rhodes, enabled as always by her cavalier, caught him one day leaving his second-rate quarters. He almost slammed the door in haste to shut it, absurdly worried that the Seventh House would find out he was still living in a bathroom.

"I suppose you have not come to request the intercession of a white priest in your final days," he mused, eyeing the wheeled chair that spoke to her infirmity. It was the first thing he'd said to another person in days.

"Oh - well… no. Just to talk, Master Octakiseron," she replied, refusing to be put off. "How are you and Brother Asht doing? This business with the Sleeper is frightful, isn't it?" She smiled at him, even - who would smile at a time like this? - as her massive cavalier brought her nearer. Up close, she was smaller and more fawn-coloured than he had expected - smaller than him. 

"I am perfectly adequate, thank you, Lady Septimus," he said.

"That's good. Despite all the tragedy, I think I'm doing well too. The danger makes me feel alive," she informed him rather inappropriately. "But we have to be sensible. Listen, me and Protesilaus, and the Fifth and the Ninth and Marta the Second, and whoever else will come, we're going to band together and see what can be done about the Sleeper. I came to tell you that the Eighth House are welcome to join us too."

"I have nothing to fear from spiritual dregs too primitive to wield anything better than a firearm," he said, "and neither do you." 

"After Pal and Cam I'm not so sure about that. It has some way of incapacitating its victims..." She fretted with her frilly sleeves.

"Those who it killed were nothing more than beasts to the slaughter," he reassured her. "They merely did not bother to defend themselves."

She blinked. "Well, that's a fucked-up thing to say! I can't believe - _I_ know they would never - look, you can't blame people for their _own murders._ " He pressed his lips together; he was right, but he could not explain it without admitting what had happened to his cavalier. "Never mind. Master Octakiseron, if nothing else, will you come and speak to Lady Pent? I think she'd like to confer with another spirit magician."

"I will not join your conglomerate of heretics and leftovers," he said with satisfaction. He would not be subsumed into something bigger; he did not need to herd like a prey animal. "You are in my way now. Leave me alone."

 _"Perihelion, fleeting / thaws not orbit's dim dust,"_ Ebdoma quoted unexpectedly. Looking up, Silas saw that while the adept was all earnestness and bravery, her warrior's face was etched with real dislike. This made him feel even better: the hatred of the masses was often the mark of a martyr. In his own House he was despised by plenty.

"Forget it, Protesilaus," Dulcinea said, reaching up to grip the man's arm indecorously, and he began to wheel her away. "We're staying in the Second's rooms if you want to find us. But - you should take a look at yourself, Eighth!" she snapped over her shoulder as they retreated. He did not know what she meant. Anyway, he had always been taught that self-reflection was vanity.

\--

Silas had not seen the Third House trio for a long time - frankly he had put off going to find them in the hope that they would soon be found dead - but he could not leave them to be taken in by the living group if they turned out to be fakes. He suspected that, in typical Third fashion, they would be indulging themselves in the warmth of their rooms. The time had come to intrude into that unknown territory.

The Third were housed on a brightly lit mid-level that had not yet flooded, but was already turgid with the smell of damp and mould. As Silas made his way inward, he became aware of other odours mixed in too: the faint scents of decorative perfumes, together with something even more distasteful. The sense that the place was not built right was stronger than ever. Lengthy stretches of corridor were often interrupted by blank, empty rooms or other corridors at jutting angles, and nothing matched his map anymore no matter how hard he tried. Eventually, he resigned himself to following his nose to where the stench was strongest, and once he did this he reached his destination quicker than he would have liked. He knocked, but there was no response, so he stepped in through the unlocked door.

Inside, the smell was far worse - his gorge rose and he had to stuff his hands over his mouth and mentally recite a prayer with every word just right in order to compose himself. That unknown note in it was of the mortuary, he realised - not the sharpness of preservatives, but the underlying stench of the decomposing body. He picked his way over burst-open suitcases that spilled over with rich clothing and yellowed books, heading to the source.

As soon as he opened the door to the bedroom he wished fervently that he had not. His head twinged violently, like the breaking of a dam in his skull. _Lord, do not forgive me this,_ he prayed. _Grant me the strength to complete my task now, but let my bones be cast out beyond the furthest ring of your Houses in death, and my spirit sunk to the bottom of the River to repent there until your return, for my sin of gross negligence._

It was awful to see a House revert so utterly to type. The Third had turned in on themselves: the four-poster necromancer's bed was a disjointed and enseamed mess of gore, wherein the body of Naberius Tern lay - a grotesque breach of taboo in itself - and he had been rent open necromantically at the throat and chest. Muddled up with him and stained with his blood was the soft figure of Ianthe Tridentarius. Her gaze was dull and unseeing as she picked strips of flesh from her cavalier's gaping torso, putting each into her mouth and chewing hungrily. Of the elder twin there was no sign. 

As he approached Tridentarius' head jerked up. Her slack face morphed into a red smile. "It's easy," she told him meaninglessly, toying with a shred of flesh. "It'll taste like a few teaspoons of salt." 

He remembered in a fearful incoherence that this had all happened before. He remembered the pure shock on Tern's face, lying dead on some other floor because of Ianthe Tridentarius - it had been _her,_ she was the power-hungry attention-desperate sinner who had betrayed her cavalier and reduced him to nothing more than a thanergy source buried deep inside her - and he remembered, less clearly, that it was her fault that Colum was dead too. 

"Be _quiet_ ," he commanded her, thoroughly upset.

She laid her head on Tern's shoulder and waited while he took the thalergy out of her, still smiling a little. It was a singularly unrewarding task, and the necrotic energy she was gorged with made it slow and difficult. Tern himself also had to be dealt with: he was still alive, despite the state of him. In fact he gazed up at the ceiling without rancour, as if he felt nothing of his wounds at all, though that was no consolation.

Silas stopped and looked again at the wound in the man's neck. Very slowly, wonderingly, he put his fingers to his own neck and touched the skin there. Then he looked again at the two bodies nestled together.

He went outside.

\--

All the way out to the edge. The wind and rain were as cold as ice here, as cold as his cell had been back on the Eighth, and the ocean roared with white noise. He tried to say a prayer, for he had never more needed blessing, but the words stuck in his throat; he was alone with his thoughts.

This Canaan must be some blasphemous summoning within the River. He knew who had died, and he had seen the living - and the _eaten alive_ \- substituted with mockeries. It must be the work of the abominable shadow cultist, for who else would trouble to find a complete replacement for the serf Nav? He felt an unbelievable bitterness that _she_ had succeeded in protecting her cavalier where he had failed. 

Worse than failed - even he could not deny himself this any longer: he was Colum's killer. He had wanted a culprit, and now he had found one. He had demanded obedience, and he had repaid it with callousness. He had thought himself a paragon of restraint among the ambitious, and yet he had squandered his nephew's life on a desperate attempt to reject that selfsame sin. He had used a lot of long words and done _nothing_ right. 

He might have stood in the lashing rain for hours yet, struggling to grasp everything he had learned; more likely he would have devoted the time to feverishly rationalising it all away again. But instead his attention was caught by a faint scuffing from behind him.

He turned and beheld Coronabeth Tridentarius emerging out of the roiling fog. Unlike her sister, she was still spotless and shining in her gold robes, but Silas remembered now that it was a false and reflected light. All her power had been granted to her by another, yoked with blood ties; she carried herself as a leader, but had been little more than a distracting figurehead. This shell of her had the look of a lost child. 

He remembered that he still had a task to complete. And he was glad of it, because just then he had never more wanted to send anybody to their death.

**Author's Note:**

> troubled_teen_declares_various_women_problematic_as_unhealthy_coping_mechanism.txt
> 
> Re: Macbeth: the GtN dinner party conversation about Ianthe being surgically removed at birth and then the joke about Silas not having the milk of human kindness hundreds of pages later drive me absolutely up the wall lol. I would've titled this fic Neptune's Ocean for extra drama if I could be certain that the Third were based there.
> 
> Other citations: Fake Ianthe's dialogue is lifted from Ianthe's explanation of how to make soup in HtN. Silas becoming Master Templar at 13 is a detail from the GtN appendices. There's a hint Colum may suffer from congenital insensitivity to pain when he picks up the ashes in the incinerator scene, which I find both distressing and thematically interesting (if improbable). 
> 
> P.S. my twitter is @goldgust please feel free to talk to me about these books, I am fixated and in it for the long haul!


End file.
